


Seen Fire, Seen Rain

by missmollyetc



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers in Space
Genre: Episode Related, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 20:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmollyetc/pseuds/missmollyetc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> What would she say, anyway?  'Hey, I'm in town, and Carlos told Alpha who told <i>other</i> Alpha who told Kim who told Kat who told me that you’ve gone insane.  See you in five minutes?'  She snorted, and gripped the steering wheel of her van tightly.  Where was the fun in <i>that?</i>  She’d beat his head in in person, like a real friend should.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seen Fire, Seen Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheSecondBatgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSecondBatgirl/gifts).



> Title taken from [James Taylor](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3uaXCJcRrE&feature=related) Grateful thanks and love to [Celli](http://celli.dreamwidth.org), [Shihadchick](http://shihadchick.livejournal.com), and [Michanna](http://michanna.livejournal.com) for their support and beta-ing duties. I would have been lost without them!

Four a.m. wasn't a bad time to be out on the road in Angel Grove these days, apparently. No crowds, and no night life, but it looked like the city council had torn down another building to monster-proof the infrastructure, and every third crosswalk had a map pointing to an underground shelter. She slowed for a yellow light, and rolled to a stop at Blinker and Nacios, taking a moment to arch her back against her seat. She relaxed with a sigh. The only place left untouched was the high school, looming into her rearview mirror with its darkened windows and shadowed courtyard.

Tanya glanced at her phone, where it rested in the catch-all slot above the gearstick. Adam was probably asleep already; she'd only wake him up if she called now. What would she say, anyway? 'Hey, I'm in town, and Carlos told Alpha who told _other_ Alpha who told Kim who told Kat who told me that you’ve gone insane. See you in five minutes?' She snorted, and gripped the steering wheel of her van tightly. Where was the fun in _that?_ She’d beat his head in in person, like a real friend should.

With one eye on the street light, she reached over the dash, flicking aside an old newspaper. She pulled the paper with Kat's careful instructions and her own badly drawn map closer to her, tilting it for a better view. The neighborhood had changed since she'd hooked up with Rocky's friend and taken their duo on the road. Looked like Adam's new apartment was on Hobart, of all places. The last time Tanya'd been on Hobart, she'd been cutting classes with Tommy, taking time off from fighting the good Ranger fight and learning how Americans wasted perfectly good daylight.

The light changed to green, and Tanya tossed the paper back onto the dash, next to the coffee cup lids. She pressed on the gas, pulling out into the empty intersection and turning left on Nacios, which apparently had turned residential as well. People must have started moving back. She yawned into her shoulder, and smiled out the windshield. It felt...it felt close to good to be back in Angel Grove after all this time, and see new housing on familiar streets. Once they'd given up the Power, all Tanya had been able to see was the wreckage Divatox had left behind, and the frightened people she'd entrusted to someone else. She'd jumped at the first opportunity to gig across California, and never looked back.

She turned right down Adam's street, and yawned again, counting down the house numbers. According to Kat, Adam lived in a quiet corner, half-way down a cul-de-sac, in a one floor duplex set behind an overgrown lilac bush. She pulled up to the curb, and killed the engine. There were two cars in the driveway leading up to the building, but no lights glowed in the windows facing the street. Well, surprise visitors couldn't expect much. Tanya opened her van door as she unbuckled her safety belt, and then hopped down to the street.

She took a deep breath, looking up at the cloudy night sky. The air left a copper and ozone tang in the back of her mouth, like the seconds before a thunderstorm. Tanya clasped her naked right wrist, and dug her fingers into the joint, twisting until the tendons relaxed with an audible pop. She let go, and walked around the front of her van to the sidewalk. If this were any other town in the world, she'd have been expecting rain. As it was, she figured it was sixty-forty they’d be graced with a monster attack before noon. She hoped the only thing destroyed this time was far enough in the new business sector that she didn’t have to stop kicking Adam’s ass long enough to evacuate to a shelter.

There was space enough for her to squeeze between the two cars parked in Adam's driveway, and get to the short, narrow flight of wooden stairs that lead up to his shared front porch. Paint flaked under her hand when she gripped the stair railing on her way up, grimacing as the wood squeaked beneath her feet. The porch lamp turned on as she reached the landing, and Tanya flinched, squinting at the sudden light. She hated motion sensors. What was the fun of arriving unannounced if the other person could see you coming? She brushed the paint chips off her hand onto her jeans, and glanced between the two doors in front of her. The one on the right had a tiny, glittery frog decal stuck to the metal number four. Tanya’s mouth twitched. Rocky's sense of humor never changed.

She stepped forward, one hand rising to knock on Adam's door, and stopped, shivering as a tingling wave of energy flashed through her. She let her hand fall, and felt her eyebrows rise. That had felt like the outer proximity sensor around the Command Center. What was it doing here?

A light came on in the window facing out next to Adam's door, and Tanya shivered again. She pressed a palm against a sudden flutter in her stomach, and licked her lips. It'd been a year, maybe a little closer to two, since she'd last seen Adam. Every reunion, he’d seemed to get a little quieter, like he was waiting for—

The door opened, and there he stood, dressed in a green t-shirt and black sweatpants, wearing only one sock. His right arm was bandaged at the wrist and elbow. His curls were falling out of his pony tail on both sides. Tanya felt the corners of her mouth tighten as Adam blinked at her with his left eye. The heated rush to get to him, to drive hell for leather down the highway and smack sense into his thick skull faltered for an icy moment. She wanted to hug him and break his nose and tuck him into bed all at once. A dark, puffy bruise covered the right side of Adam’s face, stretching from the curve of his eyebrow to the meat of his cheek. His lip was split.

"That's quite the shiner," she said instead, stepping onto his fake grass welcome mat. "Did you catch the name attached to that fist?"

Adam blinked again, a trifle more slowly. He raised his hand to touch the surgical tape holding his right eye closed. Tanya bit her bottom lip, and took a deep breath. She leaned against the door frame. No stitches, at least, that she could see. Who the hell knew what kind of damage Adam was hiding beneath his clothes.

"You had just enough juice to get your ass kicked, and none leftover to heal up?" she asked, crossing her arms over her stomach.

Adam swayed a little. He opened his mouth, inhaled, and then exhaled on a shrug. Tanya raised her eyebrows.

“Codeine?” she asked.

“So much codeine,” Adam said, nodding.

He backed up into his entryway, and turned around, waving his hand in the air in a gesture Tanya chose to interpret as welcoming and eager to make her coffee. She stepped inside, wrinkling her nose at the pile of dirty shoes cluttering up the floor, and closed the door behind her.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” she said, following him into the main area.

“Alpha set me up on the couch,” he said.

She watched Adam’s shoulders rise and fall as he half-sat, half-fell back onto the raised futon shoved against the far wall. He rested his bandaged elbow on a lumpy pillow lying at the far end of the couch. The TV was playing an infomercial about blenders, but the sound was on mute. Adam tucked the loose strands of his hair behind his ears, and tilted his head back to look at her.

“Who called you?” he asked, licking his torn lips.

Jesus. Tanya picked up the knitted blanket half-falling off Adam’s couch, and folded it over her arms. She rocked back and forth on her feet.

“Just want to get right into it, huh?” she asked, gripping her hands together beneath the blanket.

Adam shrugged, and his head waggled. “Why not?” he asked. “I’m, I mean, I’m a little blitzed right now, but I figure that can only make this conversation go faster."

Tanya took a deep, calming breath, and reminded herself that Adam had already been tossed around like a frisbee before she'd gotten there; smacking him now would only make him worse. He started up at her, unnaturally still even for Adam. His hands lay palms up in his lap. His fingers were shaking.

"Kat," she said finally. "She didn't think you'd tell me yourself."

"God," Adam said, closing his one eye briefly. "She takes a couple of psych classes, and suddenly she's—"

"freaked out by one of her oldest friends almost killing himself?" Tanya broke in. She drew her lips back, baring her teeth. "Yeah, I can see where that shit gets real annoying."

Adam frowned, and shrugged. He squinted, even though the only direct light in the room was coming from the television, and Tanya found herself moving forward, stepping into the space between Adam's coffee table and the futon. He tilted his head backwards in response, wincing a little as the back of his neck met the edge of the futon.

"Concussion?" she asked.

Adam blinked his good eye slowly. "Little bit," he said. "Alpha did the imPACT test."

A cold, hard rope of pain twisted into knots beneath Tanya's skin. She pursed her lips, and shook her head hard enough to whip her hair against her neck. The soft knit blanket twisted in her hands. Adam’s closed eye fluttered beneath its tape. If Alpha had been dumb enough to put him in a patch, he’d probably taken it off as soon as he’d gotten home. Adam hated those things.

"I've gotten worse practicing with Rocky," Adam said, jerking his left arm through the air.

"Rocky wasn't trying to kill you, you idiot," Tanya snapped, dumping the blanket in his lap. “I can’t believe how—how stupid you were! You’re supposed to keep an eye on them, not _join in!_ ”

Adam grunted. His jaw clenched, hard enough that Tanya could see it even in the low light. "Rock—you know what, I changed my mind," he said, raising his voice to a rough bark. "Get the hell out of my house."

She raised her hands in the air, fingers curling to claws, and dropped them again in a huff, barely resisting the urge to thwack Adam anyway. Concussion, concussion, he had a concussion. She couldn't hit him 'til he could only see one of her.

"Not until you tell me what the hell you were thinking of out there," she said, staring him down. "That morpher was broken. Adam, you're lucky you didn't wind up defeating the damn monster by blowing the both of you up!"

"LizWizard," Adam said. His eyes met hers and skittered away towards the TV.

Tanya clenched her hands into fists. "What?"

"Half-lizard, half-wizard..." Adam shrugged, squinting at the TV. His chest rose and fell in short bursts that Tanya could vividly remember doing herself the last time she'd bruised her ribs in a fight. "You wanna yell at me for doing the right fucking thing, at least get the damn name right."

Tanya closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. She opened them, and took another, watching Adam ignore her standing above him. The anger that had sent her careening down I-15 at midnight simmered in the pit of her stomach, and the urge to grab him by the messy knot of his pony tail and shake him until he regrew sense was starting to make her giddy.

"You could have died," she said again, willing him to think, to be the calm, quiet boy she'd almost kissed the night before she'd left town.

Adam swallowed, and glanced up at her, moving his neck stiffly. His pills were probably wearing off. He pushed the blanket off his lap, and onto the cushion next to him.

"I thought you were doing a show in Nevada?"

Tanya narrowed her eyes. "You could still die," she said. “Nevada can damn well wait.”

Adam's mouth curled upwards, and Tanya felt her own threaten to tremble. "I...Tanya..." he sighed. "Sit down, okay? My neck hurts."

Tanya pressed her lips together until they ached. She sat down next to Adam carefully, leaving the blanket between them as she settled onto the stiff fabric of the futon. Adam turned his entire body to face her, sitting ramrod straight and tucking his bandaged arm around his middle. He looked at her out of his good eye, and Tanya stared back, trying to figure out if his blown pupil was the result of the drugs, or his concussion, or just the low light.

"You trust me?" he asked.

Tanya paused, and looked away towards the smiling presenter on the TV. Her stomach tightened. "Not about this," she said, turning back to Adam. "You said you wanted that morpher as a memento, damn it."

His head shook, little bobbles up and down like he was correcting himself. "I did," he said. "It just turned out to be more useful in a fight than in a box under my bed."

Tanya leaned closer to him. "It was broken, you—"

"Should I have used the Zeo crystal instead?" Adam broke in, good eye narrowing.

Tanya flinched back, jerking her hands up between them, and suddenly she could feel the echo of the crystal in her mind, how easy it could be to be II of V again, all that power, all that purpose...

"Don't _say_ that," she said. She forced her hands down into her lap again; forced her lungs to keep breathing. “We agr—"

"Because there were civilians there," Adam's voice crackled as he spoke over her, and Tanya knew it'd been an empty threat, IV had been as bad as II, but still—

"Kids and their parents and," Adam's voice broke into shards, "all Carlos kept saying was he wasn't _good_ enough and how he had to _quit_ before someone else got hurt. What else was I supposed to do? You tell me that, Tanya. Go ahead, tell me how you would have run out on all those people."

Tanya clenched her hands into fists. She shook her head, and closed her eyes. Her stomach turned over. She would have protected the people, morpher or no. Once a Ranger, always a damn Ranger.

"I protected the civilians," Adam said, and Tanya grabbed his unbandaged wrist and squeezed until she felt his bones shift. "Is using a broken morpher worse than the alternative?"

Tanya stared at him. "It is when we're through!" she said, shaking his wrist. "We paid our dues, we're _out_ , Adam."

Her heart pounded, rattling her to the bones, and Adam just sat there, holding himself still. He twisted his wrist, shaking her hold on him until her fingers unclenched. He moved his arm back, sliding their palms together and brushed his thumb against the back of her hand.

"You think it's easy being out here? I'm the only former Ranger left in the city," he said, quietly. "You think I like taking business classes all day and hiding out in shelters when I should be out there protecting my home?"

"If it makes you so unhappy, then come out with me," Tanya said, gripping his hand. "There's plenty of room in the van. Or...or move in with Rocky in Stone Canyon!"

Adam pressed his thumb between her first two knuckles, rubbing a little. "I...that's not what I want out of life," he said.

Tanya stiffened. "Oh, well, excuse me for offering to take you away from all this." Her free hand swung out, taking in the cheap thirteen inch TV, the bare walls, and near empty bookshelves. Adam tracked the arc of her fingers with his eyes, and a smile lifted his mouth. Tanya swallowed.

"Don't do this," she said. "Come with me."

All at once, it was like she could feel every mile she’d driven pressing down on her shoulders. She’d been waiting in the wings at the concert when Kat had called, watching the main act, and ever since it’d been like old times again; racing to beat the clock before some monster beat her. Adam brought her hand to his lips, and pressed a kiss to the skin above where his thumb rested. She shivered at the whispery feel of the scab bisecting his lip. Over his shoulder, Tanya could see grey light filtering past the blinds covering his back window.

"You came all this way just to offer me a job as your groupie?" he asked.

"I came here to kick your ass," she said, and bit her lip. "But some asshole beat me to it."

Adam lowered her hand and held it in his lap. His other hand still shook against his knee. "I thought I could handle a new team," he said, looking down at the bandage wrapped around his wrist, right where he'd worn his old communicator.

"We all did," Tanya said, flexing her hand in his grip. "Why do you think we all had to leave?"

"Once a Ranger, huh?" Adam said, raising his eyebrows.

Tanya snorted. Exhaustion pulled at her suddenly, tempting her into leaning against the back of the futon and resting her head. Adam's grip on her hand loosened. He let go, and Tanya left her arm extended, let her palm slid against the worn cotton of Adam's sweatpants, and curl over the bone of his kneecap. They sat there, close enough that Tanya could feel the air move every time Adam breathed, as the morning light slipped inside the living room and illuminated the ripe flush of the bruising on Adam's face, and the grey tint to his skin. Tanya counted back the years to the last time she felt young enough to keep going, to prove her point, or drag Adam home with her, and lost count somewhere between meeting a strange girl in Africa, and following her home.

"I feel like I'd be happier yelling at you after about twelve hours of sleep," she said finally.

Adam winced a little. "How about twelve hours and another round of pain pills?"

Tanya raised her hand from his knee, and traced the broken outline of his mouth with her fingertips. A fine shiver racked Adam's body as she touched him, and Tanya pressed her index finger into the hollow above his upper lip.

"I'm taking your bed," she said.

"You're the only one here who can lay down in it," Adam said, as his voice vibrated against her skin.

She pulled away, and sat back against the futon. "And you're buying me breakfast."

Adam nodded. "There's a new diner off Van Nuys you might like."

A lick of worry gnawed at the base of her throat, shredding her voice. "And Alpha's going to check you over again."

Adam put his hands out for balance as he stood, grunting once as he unbent. Tanya followed him off the futon, and crossed her arms underneath her breasts, riding the last, dying burst of energy moving had granted her to keep herself upright. Adam shuffled past her towards a small hallway leading to two closed doors.

"And you're coming back to Vegas with me," she told his back, jamming her elbows into her sides to keep from shaking.

Adam stopped. His shoulders trembled with strain as he carefully turned around to face her.

"It's not working here," she said, quietly, meeting his good eye. "Time to try something else for a little while."

Adam swayed a little on his feet. He opened his mouth, and then closed it. He looked around his apartment, and blinked, long eyelashes fluttering

"Are you happy?" he asked. "No one else would answer that one when they called to yell at me."

"I am," she said, swallowing heavily. "I thought I wouldn't be, but I am."

Adam nodded, slowly, and took his first deep breath of the night. It dribbled out of his mouth in a pained wheeze. "Then…okay," he said.

Tanya bit back a shout of triumph, and pressed her hands against her ribs. “Okay,” she repeated, carefully not smiling too hard. She’d hug Adam later, when he didn’t look like a light breeze might send him toppling.

“Okay,” Adam said again, nodding. He raised his hand, and pointed his thumb over his shoulder to the right. “The, uh, the bedroom’s through here. There’s an extra blanket in the closet.”

“Lay on, MacDuff,” Tanya said. “I’ve got a pillow with my name on it.”

She started forward, and Adam stepped aside. “You’re the only one I know who ever gets that right,” he said.

“Well,” Tanya said, pausing on the threshold to his bedroom. “That’s because I’m special.”

Adam grinned then, impossibly brilliant, while the glimmer of the boy Tanya’d known lurked in the corners of his smile. "Guess you are," he said.

**Author's Note:**

> This deals with the fall out from the episode 275 - "Always A Chance."


End file.
